To his friends, Astronaut Charles ("Pete") Conrad Jr. is known as "Mr. Fixit." During his youth, his mother recalls, he spent hours with Erector sets, model planes and finally cars and motorcycles. While in quarantine after his Apollo 12 moon-landing, he assembled a complex stereo system. Last week the 43-year-old Navy captain continued to live up to his reputation as Houston's No. 1 amateur mechanic. During a daring and dangerous four-hour walk in space—the longest ever attempted—he and Fellow Astronaut Joseph Kerwin freed Skylab's jammed solar wing, thus probably saving the mission and brightening chances for the completion of the $2.6 billion Skylab program.
Power Shortage. As Conrad and his crew ended their second week in space, those chances seemed dim indeed. Skylab's power shortage—which resulted from the jamming of one solar panel and the loss of another during launch, when the orbital workshop's meteoroid and thermal shielding ripped off—had suddenly been compounded by a severe new problem. Two of Skylab's 18 storage batteries had failed.
Four more batteries were performing far below normal, apparently because of excessive heat and overuse. When another battery faltered in midweek (only to revive mysteriously the next day), NASA officials feared that the mission might have to be drastically curtailed.
They pointed out that the loss of only one more battery might 1) force the shutdown of the orbital workshop, 2) require the halt of all major experiments —including important biomedical tests —and 3) compel the astronauts to retreat to the cramped quarters of the Apollo command ship.
Having sufficient battery power was vital to the mission. Every time Skylab was in the earth's shadow—for some 30 minutes during each 90-minute orbit —the production of electricity by the four working windmill-shaped solar panels atop the telescope mount ceased, leaving the lab completely reliant on its batteries. Freeing the jammed solar wing thus assumed even greater importance: it could provide Skylab with another 3,000 watts of electricity while it was in sunlight and charge up eight idle batteries connected to the wing.
Soon after the astronauts had rendezvoused with Skylab last month, Astronaut Paul Weitz—leaning out of the Apollo command module—had attempted to pull the jammed wing out with a long-handled tool that resembled a boat hook. But a 2-ft.-long scrap of aluminum from the ripped shield was so tightly wrapped around the bottom of the wing that it would not extend.
NASA's engineers and technicians, who had already displayed extraordinary Yankee ingenuity in fashioning Skylab's makeshift sunshade, refused to give up. Experimenting with duplicates of tools aboard Skylab, they devised techniques for cutting, sawing and even prying off the metal. Practicing with these tools in simulated conditions of weightlessness in NASA'S big water test tank at Huntsville, Ala., Backup Astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Gibson demonstrated that the implements might well work in space.
Thus Mission Control gave the astronauts permission for the space walk. After donning their pressure suits, all three astronauts moved from the orbital-workshop area of Skylab into the multiple docking adapter. Then, while Weitz remained behind, Conrad and